Monday, March 07, 2011

Jump Ball [TechCrunch]

Applying a combination of gyroscope and accelerometer and touch and Apple has produced something that is velocity sensitive without that actual capability in the glass. What John Borthwick apologetically calls the Singularity is what I call the Audacity. And its ripples will overturn Windows as surely as OS X is back ported to iOS rather than the other way around. Our suppositions about the applications sitting atop the OS are now a jump ball. Our assumptions about Office: jump ball. Our presumptions about owning versus streaming: jump ball.

Steve Jobs described Apple’s edge as the intersection of technology and art. He played the Beatles non-stop at the launch, an audacity that worked because he challenged us to compare. At any moment, the Beatles’ momentum could have been stopped — by over or under reaching, by hubris without saving grace, by standing pat. Even the document of their failure gave birth to the moment on the roof where we see the alchemy of the group on Get Back, topped by just one more thing, the joke by Lennon about how he hoped they’d passed the audition.